Mother Henriette DeLille

Henriette DeLille was born on the eleventh of March 1812 in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the daughter of Marie-Josèphe Pouponne Dias — a free quadroon woman of African and French descent — and Jean-Baptiste DeLille Sarpy, a wealthy white merchant who maintained her mother as his plaçage partner under the New Orleans system of formal extra-marital unions between white men and free women of colour. She was educated in the convent schools of New Orleans through her fourteenth year and trained — as the daughters of free women of colour were trained — for the same plaçage life her mother and grandmother had led.

She refused at fourteen the prospective arrangement and, after a long crisis with her family and with the priesthood that culminated around 1836, took a private vow of celibacy and consecrated her life to the religious instruction and care of the enslaved Black population of New Orleans. Her ministry — conducted across the following twenty-five years from the rooming houses of the Tremé district — included catechesis, the preparation of enslaved adults for the sacraments of baptism and marriage, the elementary education of free Black children, and the care of the indigent and the dying. The plaçage system she had refused was a system the Church recognised and indeed required her to denounce.

The first founding document of the community she would lead — the Règle of 1836 — was suppressed by the New Orleans archbishop on grounds of its racial radicalism. A second attempt in 1842 produced the Sisters of the Holy Family — a community of three founding sisters, all free women of colour, whose rule required them at a time of statutory racial segregation to share their bread with the slaves of New Orleans. The community was canonically recognised by the archdiocese only in 1852 — sixteen years after Mother Henriette had begun.

She died in New Orleans of tuberculosis on the seventeenth of November 1862, at fifty. The Sisters of the Holy Family she founded continue to operate in New Orleans. Her cause for canonization was opened in 1988; she was declared Venerable by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010.

She is honored here as the foundress who ministered to the enslaved.